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Your genesis

A Christian Science perspective.

  • By the editors of the Christian Science Sentinel

Right at the outset of the Bible’s initial book, Genesis, God is presented as spiritual and utterly good. This goodness is then beautifully revealed as integral to God’s creation, too. “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). “Very good” refers to you individually and specifically – it is how God created you and it’s how you presently and eternally remain!

Immediately following these facts comes what is essentially a fable, but accepted by much of the world as fact. It’s a second account of creation – yet it’s anything but a duplicate of the first. This second account of creation in Genesis seriously misrepresents both you and God. God is depicted as anthropomorphic and you are presented as mortal, vulnerable, and sadly excluded from good.

God can’t be two things simultaneously – both Zeus-like and also infinite, ever-present Spirit. Jesus’ teachings indicate that only the first account of God and creation could possibly be valid.

Does that second account deserve to be deleted from the Bible, then? Actually, it’s very helpful to have those two versions of creation side by side right there at the very beginning of the book. The reason is that once you know the facts about true creation, it’s very useful to be warned as to how you might be lied to about this creation. Those lies usually include descriptions of man as matter, subject to matter, and separated from the goodness that is God. We can be grateful that those are just distortions of the real and good.

God always remains ever-present good, Love, and Spirit. You constantly image forth this goodness. You are the likeness of Love, and it’s your forever job to be so. Lies about you and God could never change this arrangement. To recognize genuine creation – your real genesis – means that you spiritualize your concept of yourself. A good start in doing this is to apprehend that you aren’t given two identities, one temporal and one eternal. There is a single God, a single divine Life. Great progress happens the moment you admit that divine Life is yours. God doesn’t give you life; God is your Life. Moment by moment, you’re living out from the Life that is God.

To acknowledge that God is the only Life you’ll ever have is to spiritualize both thought and existence in a truly enlightening way. Cherish each instance you express the joy, energy, vitality, and absolute invulnerability of Life. Doing so lifts your thought above fables of creation – of you as matter governed by material sense – and of all the parodies of lack and separation from good that go with them.

“Mortal man can never rise from the temporal débris of error, belief in sin, sickness, and death, until he learns that God is the only Life,” states Mary Baker Eddy (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 289). This coming week, why not try watching how spiritualized thought, based on the true record of creation in Genesis, affords you enduring and tangible joy.

From an editorial in the Christian Science Sentinel.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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